Our Incredible, Wondrous, Dysfunctional American Government.......

It is a rainy, lazy Sunday afternoon in east Tennessee.  The liquid began falling around midnight and has not really stopped, except for a few minutes at a time.

I like rain.  I like the soothing drum of it as it pelts the roof and windows.  And I like the thunder that sometimes accompanies it.  It makes me relaxed and contemplative, and I like it when I am relaxed and contemplative.  My mind wanders more than usual and it makes me smile when my imagination is holding sway.

Well, thank God the media coverage of the Boston bombing has subsided.  In the 24/7 day-on-day coverage that continued with no letup in sight, North Korea successfully launched an ICBM; a number of barges collided on the Mississippi River, causing untold damage and blocking one of America's busiest avenues of transport; a fertilizer plant explosion in Texas killed 14, injured 150 and leveled five square blocks of the town of West, Texas.  One would never know any of that, however, amid the blanket coverage of the Boston Marathon terrorism. 

Someone I respect said that Boston got all the media attention because it was a case of wealthy people with $200 running shoes and big bank accounts sucking the coverage away from blue collar workers in middle America and the fact that no one cares if North Korea has a missile with a nuclear warhead attached until they actually take out the US west coast. 

I wonder how many hundreds of millions of dollars (billions?) was spent trying to locate the perpetrators of the Boston bombing.  The entire city of Boston was shut down for one entire day.  Thousands of military, police and fire personnel were activated for days.  Untold equipment was brought in---all to find two crazy guys. 

I especially liked it when the guvnah of Massachusetts announced to everyone after a long day of searching every property in the designated search area that it was now safe to come out. Ha.  Politicians are great, aren't they?  I mean...they are always wrong.  It was not ten minutes later that all hell broke loose in the 'hood with gunfire and helicopters and lions and tigers and bears until finally they had caught the second Muslim terrorist. 

Then it came to light that the Russians had warned us about these two guys.  The older perp was interviewed and nothing came of it.  Even when he left the country for 6 months to go to Chechnya for training, it raised no red flag with the FBI.  Kinda' reminds me of the events preceding 9-11, when our government was given all kinds of warnings and leads but chose to do nothing.  Remember how those who flew the planes into the Pentagon and the WTC only wanted to be trained on how to take off and not how to land the planes?  Duhhh. 

Nothing's changed.

Think I'll go back to looking at the rain.